The Devil's Playground Read Online Free PDF

The old man was gone.
    Jon thought about the tissues on the floor, the unexpected
    sight of the old man naked, but surely it was more than
    that. The thought that he’d somehow driven him off was not
    something he wanted to contend with. Not now. Not with
    all this work still to be done, this flickering mass of pixelated
    crap.
    He pulled the curtains shut, drained the scotch, shut down
    the computer and turned on the dying minutes of a football
    game. Took a couple more painkillers. His headache had
    settled behind his eyes, fine white pins of pain piercing his
    retinas.
    The phone rang.
    It sounded like something snapping inside his head.
    Each ring seemed to get louder. Dave checking he was
    working. Dave hassling him. He almost didn’t pick it up. But
    what if it was Jake? He picked up, said, ‘Hello’, trying not to
    slur, to sound too drunk or drugged.
    ‘Mr Jon Reed?’
    ‘Yes?’ he said, muting the TV.
    ‘My name is Detective Ronald van Hijn, Amsterdam
    police.’ There was a pause in which the detective seemed to
    be lost for words. Jon stared blankly at the mute players
    dancing across the brilliant green. The detective coughed.
    His voice sounded thin and far away. ‘I’m afraid I have some
    bad news for you, Mr Reed.’
     
    Wouter tied her to the four corners of the bed using pairs of
    tights he had taken out of her drawer. The arms came first;
    small wrists covered by smooth Lycra, pinioned to the brass
    ends of the headboard. When he was satisfied that her arms
    were safely pinned, he began tying her feet, wrapping the
    tights around her ankles, ankles he dearly loved, and pulling
    them across to either side of the bed.
    Suze said nothing, didn’t struggle, let him continue with his
    slow seduction as she stared at the black of the blindfold that
    covered her eyes and saw the desert appear in front of her.
    It was a good image. An image drawn from the vast
    repository of her youth. Before things had turned bad.
    Before …
    She focused on the lone mesa in the distance, black and
    mysterious in the corners of her memory, as she heard him
    taking off clothes, coughing, getting on top of the bed and
    mumbling something in Dutch.
    She told him to hit play on the deck. The sound of the
    Geraldine Fibbers’ second album, Butch, alternatingly soft
    and savage, saturated the room. She felt his tongue, warm
    and sticky, slide up her thigh, and though it was almost like
    being tickled, she tried not to move or squirm, instead letting
    the creeping sensitivity drown her as it raced across her body
    making nipples stand cold and rosy, skin prick up as if
    expecting an unexpected guest. He noticed this and began
    to play with her breast, grabbing the nipple slightly between
    his teeth, tightening the grip and gently releasing as he heard
    her moan.
    He lit a cigarette, reached over to the bedside table and
    picked the two clothes pegs off it. She felt the cold plastic
    clamp her nipple and the warm trickle of pleasure that
    coursed up through her neck and down her thighs. She saw
    the desert, the hands of her mother shaking in an alcoholic
    rage, the sound of her father on an answering machine, the
    closest she got to him for many years, that disembodied
    crackle and pulse of humming lines and whispered, breathy
    urgencies that could only be expressed in the close confines
    of a faraway telephone booth - she saw all that and then it
    was blown away, scattered and gone.
    He placed the other clothes peg, twisted it so that her
    nipple seemed almost to blush as the blood engorged it,
    darkening the already dark skin there. He felt her move,
    gyrate slightly, though he could sense that in some essential
    way she was no longer with him, that somehow in her
    restraints she’d managed to escape to somewhere small and
    private, and he entered her then, feeling himself ready to
    explode, the cigarette slowly burning down in the ashtray
    beside the bed.
     
    *Now that wasn’t too hard, was it?’ Suze said as he undid